1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to maintaining a computer system, and more particularly to a method, apparatus and program storage device for scheduling the performance of maintenance tasks to maintain a system environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The defining environment for application development is changing. E-business applications are being used to leverage the Internet as a platform for building and integrating applications over a network environment. Further, application servers are moving from a processor-based operating system to an Internet-based operating system or network computing. However, this term may be somewhat ambiguous. Nevertheless, this term is increasingly being used to refer to virtual applications that are assembled from many different components that run on many machines across a network as if they were a single system. Components can range from entire centralized applications to single modules of a larger distributed application. Most important, it is becoming clear that only virtual applications can deliver the flexibility to meet many of the lead-edge needs of today's corporate information systems. Accordingly, these application servers are being used to integrate applications, business processes, and data. To leverage investments, businesses are turning to open standard based infrastructures to allow solutions to be crafted based on the best products for an application, process, etc. rather being locked into a single-vendor solution.
However, such an open standard integrated solution throughout the enterprise requires tools and systems to accomplish the integration, connectivity, modeling, monitoring and management functions. People, processes, information, and systems must be integrated throughout the enterprise. Connectivity refers to connecting applications and systems across a company and to partners and customers. Modeling includes the ability to model and simulate business processes to graphically represent the flow of work across people and application systems. Monitoring is provided by tracking business processes as they execute in applications and systems across the enterprise. Management of the enterprise demands visualization of immediate operational results of business processes. This critical knowledge enables review of business and system processes over a period of time so that bottlenecks and problem areas can be identified and corrected.
In order to connect processes and to transform data, a diverse collection of functions must be provided. This diverse collection of functions is referred to as middleware. The term middleware is an inclusive term that encompasses many disparate functions that do not easily fit within other architectural components. Thus, middleware may be considered an aggregation of distinct subcomponents. Middleware provides application services that were once written into applications. However, these services today are provided in an independent infrastructure layer. Middleware enhances application integration by providing uniform mechanisms to bridge old and new technologies, or by enabling dissimilar elements to work together.
One type of middleware is message-oriented middleware. Message-oriented middleware allows application programs that may be distributed across similar or dissimilar platforms and/or network protocols to exchange data with each other using messages and queues. In order to maintain a clean and efficient environment, certain maintenance procedures must be run regularly. Such maintenance tasks, however, are not easily performed by built-in utilities. In fact some important tasks cannot be performed at all by built-in utilities. Thus, the system administrator is left with the task of determining how to best carry out these tasks. Still, not all administrators are skilled in programming such tasks. Moreover, administrators may not know the optimum time to run maintenance tasks. For example, maintenance tasks may be scheduled to run too often. Because such maintenance tasks may be resource intensive, the performance of the server may suffer. Alternatively, maintenance tasks may not be scheduled often enough and therefore the system may not be operating efficiently.
It can be seen then that there is a need for a method, apparatus and program storage device for scheduling the performance of maintenance tasks to maintain a system environment.